They were conceived in the course of research carried out with curator and art critic Vanessa Desclaux, based on archival holdings on the “preservation schools” of Cadillac, Doullens and Clermont-de l’Oise, public placement institutions for under-age girls in France from the late 19th to the mid-20th century. Agnès Geoffray and Vanessa Desclaux have explored the careers of young girls described as “deviant” or “ineducable”, locked up for several years for behaviors that deviated from the social and moral norms governing their gender. By comparing the works of Agnès Geoffray with a selection of historical documents (photographs, press articles, administrative documents), the exhibition focuses on the forms of their rebellion and the expression of their aspirations for emancipation. The photographs depict gestures of opposition, defense, uprising, running away or escape. They create fictional portraits of female figures who face up to or, on the contrary, resist by fleeing, to escape the violence of confinement. On the surface of certain images, excerpts of texts are projected, allowing the written, shouted or sung words of these young girls to resonate. In the exhibition, writing embodies an emancipatory function, enabling people to reappropriate words and make their voices heard. If the exhibition echoes a society and institutions that have since been transformed, it invites us to rethink today, in a poetic and political way, the marginalized existences of these young girls whose bodies were subjected to the sanitary, moral, medical and educational hold of a prison enterprise that did not speak its name.
Curator: Vanessa Desclaux.
Commandery: Sainte – Lucie
